Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 2.4 | Or you to Hecuba

The monotony of security dulls the best cop in the most stressful situations. Maybe the Spartan hoplites had perfect vigilance, achieved through a lifetime of brainwashing and dispossession. Now there were laws against that -- which, paradoxically, ensured the laws would always be imperfectly enforced. Perhaps the innate unfairness of the system was obliquely intentional: without the chance to beat even a traffic ticket, life would be unbearable, even if in other ways your destination was decided by your origin.

alphaDana tried to be philosophical about it but she was still angry. Not only had the cops shown they could violate her mind whenever she wanted -- and her mind was where she worked -- they were stupid about how they used this awesome power, and easily tricked. Of course she knew that was the case. She had never had a high regard for police. Still, it was unsettling to have her prejudices confirmed in spades.

She kept her vlog on standby as she hurried down Sparks Street. She only detected a few other vloggers -- their field of vision and focus manifesting to her scanners as a thickening cloak of shifting coloured flicker, clinging and elongating in deeper colour as one zoomed in at the expense of his peripheral vision, then paling and panning out.

Once she was safely away from the police station she was an order of magnitude less interesting. She didn't think she'd been vlogged leaving. After that it was simply a James Bond crowd piercing trick: one chooses somewhere to be and walks there with the freshness and attention of a new sponge. Someone who runs is obvious; someone who is overly casual is obvious; someone who has somewhere important to be is only enviable.

If she was going to scan and edit the dump before getting it back to Colin she'd have to get it down and out fast, faster than her tech allowed. Which was a good reason to let her go. Most people wouldn't be able to download, clean and press the afternoon, and burn it in time for Thursday. But strictly speaking, she wasn't thinking of people.

She skimmed her afternoon as she walked, tagging elements for later removal, such as running out of toilet roll and having to jump-squat from one stall to another with her drippy bush canted out like a real dam-building beaver. That would be trivial to excise so well that no one who wasn't there would ever notice. Not that she really, really cared. She hadn't exactly ogled herself. It was strictly principle: she didn't want it burned on record to show up under a freedom of information inquiry in twenty years and be turned into performance art. Not like her baby pictures.

Posted by gtaylor at April 18, 2002 08:00 AM